Even as in her troubled dreams, she saw Hector Dunoisse standing before her, with that swift play of his emotions vividly passing in his face; and heard him passionately saying that the hour that saw him broach those tainted stored-up thousands should be for him an hour of branding shame; and that he prayed the dawning of the day that should break upon his completed barter of Honor for Wealth, and Rank and Power, might find him lying in his coffin.
And then he yielded—or so it seemed to her, and took the shining money, and the princely diadem offered him by smooth strangers with persuasive courtly voices, and she saw the fateful gold scattered from his reckless hands like yellow dust of pollen from the ripe mimosa-bloom when the thorny trees are bowed and shaken by the gusty winds of Spring.
And then she saw him going to his Coronation, and no nobler or more stately figure moved onwards in the solemn procession of Powers and Dignities, accompanying him through laurel-arched and flower-wreathed and flag-bedecked streets to the Cathedral, where vested and coped and mitered prelates waited to anoint and crown him Prince. And where, amidst the solemn strains of the great organ, the chanting of many voices, and the pealing of silver trumpets, the ceremony had nearly reached its stately close, when the jeweled circlet that should have crowned his temples slipped from the aged Archbishop’s venerable, trembling hands and rolled upon the inlaid pavement, shedding diamonds and pearls like dewdrops or tears.... And then she saw him lying, amidst wreaths of flowers and tall burning tapers, in a black-draped coffin in the black-hung nave. And a tall man and a beautiful woman leaned over the death-white face with the sealed, sunk eyes, smiling lustfully in each other’s. And she awakened at the chime of her silver clock in her quiet room; and it was dark, and the lamp-lighter was kindling the street-lamps, and she must rise and prepare for her night’s vigil.
It taxed her, for her dream-fraught sleep had not refreshed. But she ministered to her fevered, pain-racked patient with gentle unwearying patience and swift, noiseless tenderness, through the hours that moved in slow procession on to the throning of another day....
Her patient slept at last, and woke as the dawn was breaking, and the watcher refreshed the parched lips with tea, and stirred the banked-up fire to a bright flame, and went to the window and drew up the blinds.
Drab London was mantled white with snow that had fallen in the night-time. And above her roofs and chimneys, wrapped in swansdown mantles, glittering with icicles, the dawn came up all livid and wild and bloody, with tattered banners streaming through the shining lances of a blizzard from the East that shook the window-panes like a desperate charge of cavalry, and screamed as wounded horses do, frenzied with pain and terror amidst the sounds and sights of dreadful War.
XXI
Between Dullingstoke Junction and the village town of Market Drowsing in Sloughshire, lay some ten miles of hard, level highway, engineered and made in the stark days of old by stalwart Romans who, ignorant of steamrollers and road-engines as they were, knew as little of the meaning of the word Impossibility.
One of those ancient road-making warriors might have approved the fine height and shapely form of a soldier who marched at ease along the highway, wearing, with a smart and gallant air, the blue, white-faced full-dress uniform of a trooper in Her Majesty’s Hundredth Regiment of Lancers, without the sword, and the plumed head-dress of blue cloth and shiny black leather, which a forage-cap—of the muffin pattern more recently approved by Government—replaced.